A few years ago, the world-wide
American periodical Life Magazine could announce that Oscar
Schindler - famous as the central figure in Spielberg`s film
"Schindler`s List", which received 7 Oscars - had been
acclaimed a hero and elevated to the "Heroes`Hall of
Fame". Side by side with famous historical figures like
George Washington, Gandhi, Churchill and Martin Luther King ...

This Oscar Schindler has been described as a cynical, greedy
exploiter of slave workers during the Second World War, a
black-marketeer, gambler, member of the Nazi party eternally on
the lookout for profit, alcoholic playboy and shameless womanizer
of the worst sort.

In the beginning of the 1960s, this same Oscar Schindler was
honoured in Israel and declared "Righteous" and invited
to plant a tree in The Avenue of the Righteous, which leads to
the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. A memorial in the Park of
Heroes praises him as the Saviour of more than 1,200 Jews!

Today there are more than 6,000 descendants of Schindler`s
Jews living in the USA and Europe, and many in Israel. Before the
Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.5
million. Today there are between 3,000 and 4,000 left.

Rake - and Saviour ... Who was this Oscar Schindler
who
started by earning millions of German marks through exploitation of slave workers and ended by spending his last
pfennig and risking his life to save "his" 1,200
Schindler Jews from Hitler´s
death camps?

Oscar Schindler was born on April 28th, 1908, in Zwittau in
Czechoslovakia in a home imbued with his parents` deep piety. The
nearest neighbours were a Jewish Rabbi family, and the two sons
became Oscar`s best friends. The family was one of the richest
and most prominent in Zwittau, but as a result of the deep
economic depression of the 1930s, the family firm became bankrupt.

On March 6,
1928, Emilie and Oscar married, and the wedding celebration took place
in an inn on the outskirts of Zwittau

Now without employment, Schindler joined the Nazi party, as
did many others at that time. It was opportune, when one
remembers that the first German divisions invaded Czechoslovakia
in 1939. Maybe because he had seen possibilities which the war
brought in its wake, he followed on the heels of the SS when the
Germans invaded Poland.

Oscar Schindler quickly got on good
terms with the local Gestapo chiefs and rejoices here over life in the
beginning of the 1940s - he was a womanisor and heavy drinker, but continually
risked his life to save his Schindler Jews from the deathcamps.

Schindler was recruited by the German Intelligence Agency to collect
information about Poles and was highly esteemed for his efforts -
a fact that was to play a decisive role later in the war for
Schindler, when he needed all his contacts.

He left his wife Emilie in Zwittau and moved to
Crakow, where
he took over a Jewish family`s apartment. Bribes in the shape of money
and illegal black market goods flowed copiously from Schindler
and gave him control of a Jewish-owned enameled-goods factory,
Deutsch Emailwaren Fabrik, close to the Jewish ghetto, where he
principally employed Jewish workers. At this time presumably
because they were the cheapest labour ...

But slowly as the brutality of the Nazis
accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their
plan for the total extermination of the Jews
dawned on Schindler in all its horror - he came to see
the Jews not only as cheap labour, but also as mothers, fathers,
and children, exposed to ruthless slaughter.

So he decides to risk everything in
desperate attempts to save "his" 1200 Schindler Jews
from certain death in the hell of the death camps. Thanks to
massive bribery and his connections, he gets away with actively
protecting his workers.

The SS officer
Amon Goeth, the commandant of the Plaszow labor camp, had made the final
liquidation of
the Crakow ghetto and had experience at three death camps in
eastern Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka ...

The conditions of
life at Plaszow were made dreadful by Goeth. A prisoner
in Plaszow was very lucky if he could survive in this camp more
than four weeks. The camp shown in Spielberg's film Schindler's List is the exact description of
Plaszow.

Amon Goeth passed his mornings by using his high-powered, scoped rifle to shoot at children playing in the
camp - he often would use it as an incentive to work harder. For example, some young men hauling coal were moving too slow for his
liking. He shot one of them with his sniper rifle so the rest
would hurry up.

Oscar Schindler outwitted Hauptsturmfuhrer
Amon Goeth. When Schindler requested that those
Jews who continued to work in his factory be moved into their own
sub-camp near the plant "to save time in getting to the
job," Goeth complied. From then on, Schindler found that he
could have food and medicine smuggled into the barracks with less danger. The
guards, of course, were bribed, and Goeth never was
to discover it, though Oscar Schinder was arrested twice ...

At the point when his ambitions have been
realized and he could walk away from the war a rich man while
"his Jews" die in Plaszow and Auschwitz,
Oscar Schindler desperately spends every penny he has bribing and
paying off Amon Goeth and other Nazi officials to protect and
save his Jews.

In a symbolic reversal of his earlier purpose in life, he spends all the money he made by exploiting the labour of
Jews in buying the lives of Jews; whatever is not spent in
bribing Goeth and other Nazi officials is subsequently spent in
feeding and protecting his Jews.

At his factory, situated by the
work camp of Plaszow, Nazi guards are instructed to stay on their
side of the fence and nobody is allowed inside the factory
without permission from Schindler himself. He spends every night
in his office so he can intervene if the Gestapo come.

Twice he is arrested by the Gestapo - but is released, undoubtedly first and foremost because of his many
connections.

At his factory, workers are only
half as hungry as in other camps - meals at Schindler`s have a
calorie count of 2000 as against 900 in other places. When food
supplies are critical, Schindler spends great sums of money
purchasing food supplies on the black market.

At his factory the old are
registered as being 20 years younger, children are registered as adults. Lawyers, doctors and artists are registered as metal
workers and mechanics - all so they can survive as essential for
the war industry.

At his factory, nobody is hit,
nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps like the nearby
Auschwitz.

Jewish slave workers
at Schindler`s
factory in Plaszow

They were protected and saved by Oscar Schindler. In those years, millions of Jews died in
Nazi death camps like Treblinka and
Auschwitz, but Schindler`s Jews miraculously survived, to their
own surprise, in Plaszow right up to 1944. Schindler
bribed the Nazis to get food and better treatment for his Jews during a
time when one of the most civilized nations of the world was capable of
systematic mass-murder.

When the Nazis were beaten back on the East
Front, Plaszow and its satellite camps were dissolved and closed.
Schindler had no illusions as to what that would entail. Desperately he exerted his influence on his contacts in the
military and industrial circles in Crakow and Warsaw and finally
went to Berlin to save his Jews from a certain death. With his
life as the stakes, he employed all his powers of persuasion, he
bribed uninhibitedly, fought, begged ...

Where no-one would have believed it possible,
Schindler succeeded. He was granted permission to move the whole
of his factory from Plaszow to Brunnlitz in occupied
Czechoslovakia and furthermore, unheard of before, take all his
workers with him. In this way, the 1,098 workers who had been
written on Schindler`s list in connection with the removal
avoided sharing the fate of the other 25,000 men, women and
children of Plaszow who were sent without mercy to extermination
in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, only 60 kilometers from Plaszow.

By a mistake 300
Schindler-women were routed on a train to Auschwitz. Certain death awaited. A
Schindler survivor, Anna Duklauer Perl, later recalled:'I knew
something had gone terribly wrong .. they cut our hair real short and sent us
to the shower. Our only hope was Schindler would find us.'

After weeks Anna and the other
Schindler-women were being herded off toward the showers again. They did not
know whether this was going to be water or gas. Then they heard a voice:'What
are you doing with these people ? These are my people.' Schindler! He
had come to rescue them, bribing the Nazis to retrieve the women on his list
and bring them back.

The women were released - the
only shipment out of Auschwitz during WW2.

When the women returned to
Brunnlitz, weak, hungry, frostbitten, less than human, Schindlermet them in
the courtyard. They never forgot the sight of Schindler standing in the
doorway. And they never forgot his raspy voice when he - surrounded by SS
guards - gave them an unforgettable guarantee:'Now you are finally
with me, you are safe now. Don't be afraid of anything. You don't have to
worry anymore.'

At Auschwitz the children were generally killed upon
arrival. Children born in the camps were
often killed on the
spot, especially if the child was Jewish.

So called camp doctors, especially the notorious Josef Mengele, would torture and inflict
incredible suffering on Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. "Patients" were put into pressure
chambers,
tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to
various other traumas. Often Mengele injected chemicals into the
eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color.

One twin recalls the death of his
brother:

"Dr.
Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not
sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele
made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine
left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then
they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation,
I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It
is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken
away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now,
my twin ..."

These terrors occurred in Block 10 of Auschwitz
I. Josef Mengele was nicknamed "the Angel of Death" for
the inhuman experiments he conducted.

Near the end of the war, in order to cut
expenses and save gas, "cost- accountant
considerations" led to an order to place living children
directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits.

Oscar Schindler knew. He toiled through the rough waters of the confusions of war
and surfaced from the chaos to save his Jews. Generations will
remember him for what he did ...

Until the liberation of spring, 1945, Oscar
Schindler used all means at his disposal to ensure the safety of
his Schindler-Jews. He spent every pfennig he had, and even
Emilie Schindler`s jewels were sold, to buy food, clothes, and
medicine. He set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with
medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie
Schindler looked after the sick. Those who did not survive were given a fitting
Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard - established and paid for by
Schindler.

Later accounts have revealed that Schindler spent
something like 4 million German marks keeping his Jews out of the
death camps - an enormous sum of money for those times.

Even though the Schindlers had had a large mansion placed at
their disposal close to the factory, Oscar Schindler understood
the fear which his Jews had of nocturnal visits from the SS. As
in Plaszow, Schindler did not spent one single night outside the
little office in the factory.

The factory continued to produce shells for the German
Wehrmacht for 7 months. In all that time not one usable shell was
produced! Not one shell passed the military quality tests. Instead, false military travel passes and ration cards were
produced, just as Nazi uniforms, weapons, ammunition and
hand-grenades were collected. But still, a tireless Schindler succeeded in these months in
persuading the Gestapo to send a further 100 Belgian, Dutch and
Hungarian Jews to his factory camp "with regard to the
continuing war industry production".

In May, 1945, it was all over. The Russians moved into
Brunnlitz. The previous evening, Schindler gathered everyone
together in the factory and took a deeply emotional leave of them.

He told them they were free, he
was a fugitive."My children, you are saved. Germany has lost the war."
He asked that they didn't go into the neighboring houses to rob and
plunder. "Prove yourself worthy of the millions of victims among you
and refrain from any individual acts of revenge and terror". He
announced that three yards of fabric were to be given each prisoner from his
warehouse stores as well as a bottle of vodka - which brought a high price on
the black market.

At five after midnight - certain
that his Jews finally were out of danger - Oscar Schindler left the factory.
"I must leave now", Schindler said, "Auf Wiedersehen".

Oscar Schindler - and 1200 Schindler-Jews along
with him - had survived the horrors of the Holocaust ....

The
Americans captured Amon
Goeth and turned him over to the Poles. Goeth
was convicted of the murders of tens of thousands of people. He was
hanged for his crimes in Crakow on September 13, 1946.During his trial Goeth
displayed provocative indifference. And even though he is being hanged,
Amon Goeth still salutes his Fuhrer in one final act of defiance ...

Poldek Pfefferberg, the Schindler Jew who helped
Oscar Schindler procure black-market items to bribe Nazi officers
with during the war, later told he promised Schindler to tell his
story:"You protect us, you save us, you feed us
- we survived the Holocaust, the tragedy, the hardship, the
sickness, the beatings, the killings! We must tell your story
...."

Schindler`s life after the war was a long series of failures.
He tried without success to be a film producer and was deprived
of his nationality immediately after the war. Threats from former
Nazis meant that he felt insecure in post-war Germany, and he
applied for an entry permit to the United States. This was
refused as he had been a member of the Nazi party.

After this he fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina with his wife
Emilie, his mistress and a dozen Schindler Jews. He settled down
in 1949 as a farmer, supported financially by the Jewish
organization Joint and thankful Jews, who never forgot him.